- Amid rising technology tensions between the United States and China, the country’s vast undersea cable network is becoming a new source of tension in international relations.
- Undersea cables are the backbone of the global internet, carrying 99% of the world’s data traffic.
- The US government has reportedly warned technology companies including Google and Meta that undersea cables in the Pacific could be targets for Chinese espionage.
Undersea cables are the backbone of the internet, carrying 99% of the world’s data traffic.
Serg Myszkovsky | Photodisc | Getty Images
Tensions between the U.S. and China over technology have fallen to their lowest level.
Submarine cables made headlines earlier this year when Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels attacked Israeli, US and British ships, cutting four of 15 vital undersea cables in the Red Sea.
As a result, public awareness of undersea cables is growing and the network is becoming a new source of tension in international relations amid intensifying geopolitical conflict between the United States and China.
According to telecommunications market research firm Telegeometry, hundreds of giant communications cables stretching some 1.4 million kilometers are buried deep beneath the ocean floor.
Some of these cables are short, such as the 131-kilometer CeltixConnect cable that links Ireland and the UK, while others run much longer distances, such as the 20,000-kilometer Asia America Gateway cable.
The number of undersea cables worldwide is expected to increase over the next few years, reflecting the growing demand for data traffic due to the popularity of video streaming and cloud services.
Telegeometry said that as of early 2024, its data tracked 574 operating and planned undersea cables.
Submarine cables are the backbone of the global internet, carrying 99% of the world’s intercontinental data traffic.
“If you’ve ever emailed, texted or video chatted with someone on another continent, you’ve probably used undersea cables without question,” Andy Champagne, chief technology officer at Akamai Labs, told CNBC in an email.
“On land we are connected by a complex physical network of fibre optic cables, but when you go underwater the topology becomes much more difficult,” Champagne added.
“Laying undersea cables is very complicated. And when something goes wrong with an undersea cable, repairing it is no easy task.”
The main thing that makes undersea cables so important is the impact if they are cut, said Joe Vaccaro, vice president and general manager of Thousand Eyes, an internet monitoring company owned by Cisco.
““Individuals like you and me don’t say, ‘The undersea cable just went down.’ What we notice is that the applications that we were trying to access suddenly became very slow or unavailable,” Vaccaro said in an interview with CNBC.
“When these cuts happen, ultimately the underlying providers that are carrying that traffic have to dynamically shift that traffic to alternative routes,” Vaccaro added. “And then what happens? You get some congestion.”
Undersea cables have traditionally been owned and operated by telecommunications companies, but more recently US tech giants such as Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have been investing heavily in building their own cables.
In 2021, Meta and Google announced plans to lay two massive undersea cables linking the US West Coast with Singapore and Indonesia. The trans-Pacific cables, Echo and Bifrost, are expected to increase data capacity between the regions by 70% and improve internet reliability.
Meta has invested in both cables, while Google is only backing Echo. Meta has previously announced plans to build a 23,000-kilometer undersea cable around Africa to improve internet access, and Google is also working on building an undersea cable called Equiano that aims to connect Africa and Europe.
The Wall Street Journal reported in May, citing anonymous State Department sources, that U.S. officials had privately warned tech companies including Google and Meta that undersea cables in the Pacific region could be targets for espionage by Chinese repair ships.
SB Submarine Systems, a Chinese state-owned company that repairs international cables, appears to have hidden the locations of its ships from radio and satellite tracking systems, according to the Wall Street Journal.
SB Submarine Systems, Google, Meta and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CNBC.
Meanwhile, Estonia said it had asked China six months ago to help with an investigation into an alleged severing of two of its undersea cables by a Chinese vessel but had not yet responded. China’s foreign ministry has since said it was ready to work with Estonia to assist in the investigation.
These developments highlight how undersea cables are becoming a bone of contention for national security: the data these networks transmit can involve vital communications, such as diplomatic mission coordination, security operations and intelligence gathering.
The US government’s concerns are not new and have been widely documented.
In March 2023, Reuters reported that an interagency committee called Team Telecom was working to block undersea cables directly linking U.S. territory with mainland China or Hong Kong, due to concerns about Chinese espionage.
Many international undersea cable projects are now reportedly bypassing China due to concerns about data security and Beijing’s growing geopolitical influence, even as China is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build its own undersea cable infrastructure to rival that of the United States.
The main problem with the way undersea cables are currently laid is that the connections across the globe impact large parts of the internet infrastructure.
“If providing connectivity between two points around the world is critical to your business, you need to realize that a single cable cut in that location could have a massive impact across all major cloud providers,” ThousandEye’s Vaccaro told CNBC.
When these critical connections are disrupted, it can lead to a “blame game,” where consumers tend to blame their own services for power outages or traffic congestion.
Vaccaro added that in certain regions, it may actually make sense from a “performance and visibility” perspective for a company to use a different cloud provider than the one they use in another part of the world to ensure consistency in network quality.
“The important thing to remember about undersea cables is that there are specific requirements for where the undersea-to-land transition can be made…and there are only a limited number of geographic locations that meet those requirements,” Akamai’s Champagne said.
“As a result of these constraints, the loss of a single undersea cable can have a domino effect on the terrestrial networks that depend on it,” he added. “The impact of a cut in an undersea cable is often much greater than the loss of a land cable.”
